Hiring In The Age Of AI

AI is speeding up work, squeezing budgets, and quietly removing the “starter tasks” that used to train new hires. So the real question is not just whether we should hire graduates, but how anyone builds experience when AI can draft, summarise, and analyse faster than a junior role ever could. We take a hard look at what this means for early careers, recruitment, and long-term workforce planning, especially for organisations chasing quarterly results while trying to stay future-ready.

TL;DR / At A Glance

• broadening from graduate hiring to workforce diversity and capability
• why digital fluency is not determined by age
• AI, agency, and the potential mental health impact
• the gap between what we say, what is heard, and what we mean
• adapting to different communication styles beyond picking a channel
• using AI as a coaching tool for clearer stakeholder communication
• the real skills gap: onboarding, financial fluency, data and AI literacy, curiosity, resiliency, communication
• psychological safety as the condition for challenge and growth
• capability swaps and pairing by strengths rather than age

Kieran Gilmurray and Laura Lawless also push back on the lazy comfort of generational stereotypes. “Gen Z are digital natives” sounds neat until you see who is genuinely excited to learn, who is anxious about losing agency to algorithms, and who has the curiosity to keep improving. We talk about mental health risks, why learning agility beats age, and why a multi-generational workplace works best when leaders focus on capability, not labels.

From there Kieran Gilmurray and Laura Lawless  get practical: how communication breaks down between what we say, what people hear, and what we meant, plus how to adapt to different styles without dumbing anything down. We explore psychological safety as the foundation for healthy challenge, then move into concrete team design ideas like capability swaps and cognitive diversity roles (challenger, translator, integrator). Finally, we unpack why microlearning often fails and how to build continuous learning into the flow of work so skills actually stick.

If you care about AI in the workplace, hiring strategy, learning and development, and building high-performing teams, this conversation is your reset. 

Subscribe, share it with a colleague, and leave a review with one change you are making this month to help your team learn faster and speak up more.

Transcript

Graduates And The Bigger Question

Kieran Gilmurray 0:05

Laura, we were going to start today's series with uh graduates. Should we hire graduates now that AI is actually in the room? Because that's a very topical topic. But are we actually starting in the right place to begin?

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Well, interesting uh conversation and one that we're hearing a lot about today. And I would challenge you on that because I don't think that that is broad enough for the conversation we need to be having, um, opposed to zoning in on those bright young grads. I think we need to broaden the conversation initially and we need to look at the multi-generational workplace. We hear a lot at the minute about it this being the first time that we've ever had five generations in the workplace. Wow, you know, and that they're more generationally diverse than ever before. But the conversation, I suppose, still feels a bit lazy. And if we look back 50 or 60 years, we've had multi-generational workplaces before. So this isn't a first, and we hear the labels all the time. The Gen Zs they want flexibility, the millennials want purpose. I'll probably get one or their two of these wrong, but you know, and then Gen X's are independent, and the baby boomers, not looking at empty in particular, resist change. But the reality, the reality I'm seeing in organizations is it is more complex, it is more interesting, it is more than should we be hiring grads? Because when you strip it back and you move away from all these stereotypes, it's not really about age, it's about how we experience work, how we engage with change and how we interact with technology. Yeah, and that's where things I suppose get a little bit more interesting. You and one that I wanted to talk to you specifically about was this concept of younger employees. Are they naturally more digitally fluent? Or are we making an assumption? Are they just more confident to try things? And I'd love to know what you're seeing in that space.

Kieran Gilmurray 2:00

Yeah,

Digital Fluency Myths And AI Anxiety

Kieran Gilmurray 2:01

it's kind of interesting because uh this is the the challenge with going with marketing phrases, you know, Gen Z, Gen X, Baby Boomer, or whatever else it is, Gen Alpha, the latest one, gel beef beta being born. Um it doesn't always hold true because I go into organizations and it was interesting. Someone said to me that the other day, you know, that they they love tech. And when you actually look at the real world, um, they are actually a bit terrified of AI or or in volume. There was a piece of research by Harvard recently, and the big thing was that AI is now making the decisions for people coming in. It's kind of like Uber drivers to a degree. The algorithm decides what you're trying to do, the algorithms are optimized for productivity and and and. And if we start to give more of our agency over to AI, then all of a sudden there's an entire loss of control on what you can find. And this is something people don't talk enough about. There's a huge uh risk to AI where you're actually going to harm people's mental health. And that is very, very true of Gen Z, who are uh extraordinarily aware of the negative impacts of AI and particularly the negative impacts on them. That's why we started the conversation with should we hire Gen Z? Because I go in and meet a lot of company directors globally who are saying, Kieran, we haven't hired any Gen Z. That's right, isn't it? And my face drains and I panic, and I'm wondering, where is your next generation? And theirs is the same thing. They're so digital, you know, the the younger ones that we've got, we don't need as many. Well, I delivered a course recently to uh a wide age distribution group, shall we say, and the two 70-year-olds in the classroom were absolutely amazing. Out of anyone on the call, and there was 30, 40 people, they were the most engaged, the most capable, they consumed the AI content the most, and they were most excited by the opportunity to use the AI. So I think in general, no look, too broad, too, too narrow a comment. I think every age group is the capacity to learn. I just think we as adults, and if I use a foreign language as an example, when we're younger, we ask tons of questions. As we get older, we don't ask questions because of all the usual politics and BS and work, and we get comfortable. So we need to learn, and it doesn't matter the age group to get comfortable being uncomfortable and constantly learning.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

Because AI is robbing my line there, Kieran. I don't like it.

Kieran Gilmurray 4:22

We need to get comfortable. Well, if we get prepared for this and there was a transcript, I'd be reading ahead and stealing everything you've got. Then I could have but sadly

Communication Styles Beat Generational Labels

Kieran Gilmurray 4:32

not.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

You know what? You've mentioned two or three cure points, but I am going to stop you because you're you're getting me you're getting me interested. You know, you've mentioned a couple of things there, one being communication and the types of language that we use. And it's something I've come across um in organizations where it's being proposed that that we teach and get familiar and learn how other generations communicate. And if we look at the likes of you know the Gen Z, for example, and the slang that they use or that they typically use. And we all have our own generations and or our own language as a generation.

Kieran Gilmurray 5:09

When you use the word our own generations, that that's you've just added 10 years to to both you and I.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Yes, probably 20 to you. Um, however, and this is why I was interested to have the conversation because it you you always give me pushback on on the generational element and and you know, do we need to be in a generation? Do we need to put be put into that box and all those assumptions and stereotypes apply to us? But I but when I when I'm faced with um words like slay and ris, and what was the other one that I came across that I thought, oh that's what was that?

Kieran Gilmurray 5:45

Dragon.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Dragon. I don't know.

Kieran Gilmurray 5:47

I did say slay, and I sort of projected to slay the dragon.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Oh, that was clever of you, and I didn't pick up on that very quick, did I?

Kieran Gilmurray 5:54

No, must be your generation your generation are a bit slower, I'm I'm led to believe by marketing companies.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

We're we're focusing on moving away from stereotypes today. I don't know if you read the fine print when we we started this, but tell me, what do you think ris means?

Kieran Gilmurray 6:09

Having a clue. Having a clue. Charisma?

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Charisma. What about a mental?

Kieran Gilmurray 6:16

That's why I don't know it. Not only do I lack the understanding of the word ris, I lack the understanding of charisma as well. But everybody, but we let jump back. We had our own language, we had our own words, and and I think it goes back to how do we communicate better in the workplace, you know. So it's interesting, and I use my kids as an example. They text, I talk, I'm wondering why you're two doors down and you're texting me. And what I've learned is look, it ain't my style, it isn't their style. It's how do we actually work together to get, you know, to land the message. Because someone said to me, and this is where I do use AI. Notice I got AI into the conversation earlier on. What you say, what you hear, and what I meant are three entirely different moments in exactly the same conversation.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Repeat that for our listeners because I think that's an interesting perspective when we look at communicating and we're looking at the multi-generations in the workforce.

Kieran Gilmurray 7:14

Is that for the listener or you just weren't listening? I let me challenge you. Yeah, no, it was like communication strategists said to me recently, what you say and what is heard and what is what is meant can be three different things. So I think I'm saying what I'm saying in in my text, email, whatever, WhatsApp voicemail, what you hear might be entirely different based on the fact that you you know the mood you're in, you know, or prior previous interactions or something else. And then what you do with the information can turn out to be something entirely different, a third different altogether. And what I was getting at there is every every group, every generation, every a every person has a preferred way of communicating. If you want to communicate best with me, forget about technology for a moment. It says you will talk to me about your idea, you will give me something to touch and feel and read because I'm quite kinesthetic, you will give me a moment to read through that, then I'll ask you some questions, and then I will understand it gorgeously. If you turn up and ask me for a quick answer, you'll get a quick answer, but it won't be a great answer. Other people are quite auditory. So I notice I turn some of my uh speech, some of my communications, some of my articles into audio files because they prefer the visual into video files or PowerPoint presentations. So it's not so much a technology or age thing, it's more how do I communicate really clearly with someone in work or in a work setting so that we avoid email or telephone tennis, we avoid frustration and upset, and we just get the job done a lot quicker. And that's where I will feed in someone's personality into an AI tool. I can put in their LinkedIn profile and I can get a full psychometric breakdown of them for $2. And then I will use that in a prompt and say, how do I best communicate with this individual? Now you're aware of their style and my style, what is the best way to land the message I want to land? And that in itself uh allows me to communicate much quicker, much more clearly, upset far less people than I used to do, and just get things done a lot, a lot faster.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

And I think that that when we look at that in the workplace, you know, communication across generations, we may default to thinking that we have to choose the right channel.

Skills Gaps And Poor Onboarding

SPEAKER_01 9:29

And it's not that, it's exactly what you're talking about here. It's just about removing ambiguity. So it's focusing on things like the active listening. And we spoke about this in previous podcasts about coming back to those basic skills, active listening, giving clear specific feedback and adapting a message to the audience, perhaps, but not dumbing it down, just making it land, you know, and in a multi-generational workplace, that is a gap where you know some people are seen as good communicators and others aren't, but we don't teach it still. We still assume that people have this skill.

Kieran Gilmurray 10:02

No, we we we are so bereft when it comes to onboarding and continuous education programs because I was on a uh on a with a global group earlier on, and they were asking me, you know, what are the top ten skills? And and number one skill was a combination of three, oddly enough. It was data, AI, and financial fluency. Three skills that you would absolutely need. And then it was down to resiliency, uh, it was down to curiosity, and it was down to communication. You know, so two of the ten of mine and the World Economic Forum did the same exercise, were actually technical. The rest were ultimately really, really human. But we get people into work, we throw them into a role, we don't teach them the basics that they need. Like who is who's ever taught to write a PowerPoint presentation? I mean formally, teach communication styles, different audios. You're not. You do it in front of your manager, your manager gives you a kicking, and then you learn from that. You know, and it's the same thing, you know, we're not taught financial literacy, but that's the language of business. We need to know that every single day, we're not taught that either. You know, we're not, as I said, we're thrown into teams. We don't break down the communication style of everybody in the team. Instead, to your point, we're more focused on our innate biases or what we've been told. There's old, they'll not get it technically, there's young, they'll digitally get it. This is amazing. Uh, there's male, female, he, she, they. You know, we we uh we imbue our biases, and then we wonder why projects don't work and why teams don't automatically build themselves. You know, so I think we've a lot to do regardless of AI. It can help us, it can help us communicate, it can help us break down those barriers. But I think we've a lot to do ourselves in work before we start talking about age groups, generation, communication, or something else to step back from all this and go, why are we here and how does work work and how do we make work work?

SPEAKER_01 11:50

And we're seeing organizations doing that. The the the typical carp before the horse, let's dive in and do it, look at our demographics, see what strategies you know, we put in place to lever off the strengths of these generations. And it's not, it is that step back. It is getting curious about people how people digest information, it is getting curious about how people communicate. It is about looking at those gaps and saying, how can we have maybe those difficult conversations? How can we build communication as a capability opposed to a personality trait, which I think often is what we assume in organizations are relevant of generations? You know, again, where people are seen to be a good communicator and others aren't, but we don't teach it. So it's coming back to those basics again, where it's removing any of that ambiguity, providing people with the basic skills, you know, and and that comes back to my point as well, where where do we need to learn about the language of other people on our team, how people communicate, how we can successfully land. I think we do as well, and I think it's something that would feel a little uncomfortable for some of us to why why is it uncomfortable?

Psychological Safety To Speak Up

Kieran Gilmurray 13:01

Because I'm gonna challenge you back there, because you use the words uncomfortable conversation. No conversation has ever been comfortable in work for me where I know the person is coming from a good place. I want my colleagues to I want me to challenge me for a start. I own my own performance, but I want my colleagues, if something is is not working out the way I optimally want it, to say, is everything okay? Because it could be something going on in my life that's distracting me from work. If I then turn around and say, Well, no, everything's great, then I I'm obviously not doing a very good job. But I'd like them to actually support me in that regard. And if they challenge me, say, can that that's just not good enough? And here's the reason why it's not good enough, and here's what I observe, the facts, and you're better than that, and you should know how to do that. Actually, that's quite a healthy conversation. And the and the so-called difficult conversations have been the best ones in my career. And I have those with all of my team and everybody around me because I care enough about them, I care enough about the business, and I care enough about the customer to want work to work. And there's never anything political, never anything personal in it, but my team know me well enough by now to do that. And I don't put age into it, I don't put technology into it, I don't turn around and say, oh, let's get a 12-year-old to reverse mentor a 70-year-old. I try and remove as many of those biases as I can to make sure that I'm an effective uh member of my team and that my team members are effective and they're growing and they feel psychologically safe in the environment in which I've got them.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

Love that point around psychological safety because that that is some something that again is being overlooked in the context of the workplace currently, especially when we have people hybrid and remote, we're losing those little opportunities to build those relationships to allow those conversations to happen because people don't feel like they know somebody well enough to have what they may perceive as that challenging or uncomfortable conversation, despite the benefit that it could offer you. And, you know, I hear this a lot from leaders where they say, I want my team to speak up, I want them to challenge me, I want them to be open. But the reality is that people still feel uncomfortable doing that. And that's not a generational issue, I don't think. That's a human and a cultural one, right? So people feel uncomfortable because they the perceived risk is higher than the reward. So even if the leader says challenge me, like you're saying, I mean, I'm already saying, does he really want to hear what I think? Does he really, though? But if it is you, or subconsciously, we're we're yeah, with the subconsciously saying, is it actually safe to do that? What happens if I get it wrong? And if there's any little niggle or any little bit of doubt, people will stay quiet, right? Because it's just easier, you know, and you might feel open, as you apparently claim to be, but to somebody more junior, you're still the decision maker, for example, you're still the one who influences my progression. So that dynamic doesn't go away just because you're open, or I say I'm open. We haven't, and we haven't taught people to challenge, right? We expect well, it depends.

Kieran Gilmurray 16:04

Yeah, we've taught people not to challenge. Uh, and let me let me challenge you on something else a moment ago. I think we've taught people not to challenge by how we respond. Uh uh when you're younger in your career, you know, depending on your work experience, where you've come from, uh I was hungry to learn. And uh, I have to say I've come across a lot bad more bad managers than good managers, and probably at the start of my career I was too. No way did I start out, you know, good, bad, or ugly. And I'm sure of lots of stuff to learn as well. But how someone received the information very often determined whether you would give them it again. Uh getting, you know, critical feedback, crucial feedback, you know, development feedback, work-on feedback, whatever it is. Uh, you just don't know what people's history is or or what baggage there's there, you know. So are they new to the workplace? What have they received before? Was the prior manager, you know, a political animal? You know, what, you know, all these things come into it. Uh again, how confident the manager is, how secure the manager is in their own role, you know, how often you're willing to tolerate, uh, and I use that word deliberately, you know, failure. And I'm I'm picking failure is a key thing. Because it isn't about, you know, someone makes a mistake, you give them feedback, they make the same mistake, you give them feedback, they make the same mistake, you give them feedback. That's not that's a performance issue. So all these things are complex because as you and I said before, we don't teach people how to manage. Now, I think we're in an interesting dynamic, which is where I was coming back to challenge in the most gentle sense, is that you say, you know, you can't build team remotely. Well, that's you and me. That's you and me have been in those workplaces. We see each other, there's micro moments where you can see people's body movements and faces. But the reality for you know lots of people today is they're never ever coming into the office. So our job from uh whatever we want to call it, uh uh do we use the word multi-generational or do we just say diverse workforce? You know, because your 70-year-old who wants to, you know, be in a in a digital uh working place because it's more important that they walk on the beach every night and they're still brilliant at their job and they don't want to live in inner Dublin and spend two and a half hours getting to work. You know, it it's all the same side of things there. So so how do we how do we cope with that? And please tell me reverse mentorship is not not something on your head where you're going, I'll break down barriers.

Capability Swaps And Thinking Roles

SPEAKER_01 18:23

No, and I and I love how you're thinking around diversity, opposed to us all jumping on the bandwagon of this multi-generational workforce that has never happened before. Uh, you know, it's flip mentoring and reverse mentoring, and that's all very you know fun at the minute. But you know, I I organizations need to look at the capability and look at capability swaps. So pair people with strengths, not age. That's one thing that I would suggest in this space that can be highly beneficial. Um, another thing is to look at projects or teams and design them around individuals' cognitive diversity. So I've seen it and I've seen this work with an organization recently where they they they worked on a project and they assigned roles based on an individual's cognitive diversity. So they had the challenge.

Kieran Gilmurray 19:13

What do you mean by that case? Someone listening doesn't quite understand.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Okay, so if we look at a team and we're building a team around people's intelligence opposed to people's age or people's job title, and we remove them from the space for the minute and we say, okay, for this project, we are going to have somebody who is going to challenge. So if I said you are the challenger, what do you think that might mean in a project context?

Kieran Gilmurray 19:44

Uh in my interpretation of it, remember what's seen, what is heard, what is understood, that then I want you to come in and not to be an awkward eddy, but I want you me to come in and when we're making decisions is not just accept them because at face value, but just start to tease and pull apart. Now, not everyone, because you haven't asked me to come in and be a challenging nutter, but it again is to hold that that candle up to the light to say, look, we're all going off a cliff, but nobody ever says, Well, what could go wrong? How do we fix it? Actually, what's the proof? What's the value behind that gut feel assumption and so on?

SPEAKER_01 20:17

So it's that little So I want you to push those boundaries. I want you to question the norms. It's my challenger. Then I'm going to ask for my translator, okay? My translator is going to connect those ideas to reality, okay? They're going to align things like the stakeholders. And then I'm going to layer on my third role in that project, which is the integrator. And that's the person that's, you know, potentially more experienced, more of that emotional intelligence, um, lots of lived experience. And they do that sense check, they're connecting it to the strategy and they're doing the mitigation of risks. So for key projects, having these explicitly assigned these roles, you know, rotate them, don't lock them to age and make it visible in meetings. Ask that question who's challenging this, who's integrating this? And it moves away from stereotypes and it's more about, I suppose, intentional contribution. And it gives it permission for different voices to show up, right? But it also reduces that generational friction. So instead of their resistance or their integrating risk, you're it's not about age, it's about thinking diversity.

Kieran Gilmurray 21:24

And age, always missing things, though.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

We're always missing things.

Kieran Gilmurray 21:28

Well, you and I always are, but I'm just meaning in general is the concept here. What I mean is to do that, I would argue there needs to be something that comes before that, which is actually you need to build trust and you need to build communication style before you put them into the room, give them the four roles, and then someone over eggs the awkward Eddie role or or awkward edwork, or or whatever it is. But what I'm going back to is are there innate skills that were missing? You know, so not everybody is emotionally intelligent who's been in a business twenty years. By God, I've met one or two who who've missed that bus by a long time. Way. Not everybody who is younger, you know, is a digital and AI native and therefore perfect for teaching the CEO how to do everything. How do we make this work? Because it's all very well us saying, you know, we need a digital native, we need emotionally intelligent, we need these four roles, we need to build team, we need to build communication style and everything else. We need to build a safe space. We need to train all the managers to create these teams and understand everybody's personality and intellectual quote. And actually, we've got a day job to do as well.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

Yes. And this is all, I suppose, changing it from it being a nice idea, right? It's very easy to sit here and talk about things, but something that actually works in organizations, you know, if the foundations aren't there, you know, assigning thinking roles will feel forced and it just won't land. So, you know, we can design all these clever team roles we want, but if the basics aren't in place, people won't step into

Purpose Clarity And Learning That Sticks

SPEAKER_01 22:54

them. So what we need to look at first, and you've mentioned this already, is psychological safety. Um, safety isn't my manager is nice, or we did a workshop on it. It's can I disagree without it impacting how I'm seen? Can I ask questions without looking incompetent? Um, there needs to be the clarity of purpose. And if people don't understand, I've talked about this with a group yesterday, if people don't understand what they're trying to achieve or how decisions get made, they will not know how to contribute meaningfully. And it's amazing to this day, to yesterday, the amount of people who do not know what the organization that they're working for, what the purpose is. If you know your integrator can't connect strategy if the strategy isn't clear and they don't understand where they add value, most organizations still reward you for staying in line. So asking you to challenge or to question direction can feel like overstepping.

Kieran Gilmurray 23:50

Or career suicide aside to say. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

Um, it's not going to end well for you, you know. So again, it's being really explicit, setting that expectation. Your value here isn't your job title, it's how you think.

Kieran Gilmurray 24:03

But lots are in that hierarchical thing, you know what I mean, where if I'm sitting at a round table, I'm saying, I can remember the big tech consultancy, and it was oh, it was um uh not Disney, it was uh who Pixel, Pixar. Uh what the owner of Pixar didn't realize, or one of them was that they created a table to share ideas, you know, so that everybody got a voice. But inadvertently, if you got sitting near them, you got heard, and everybody then self-assigned the seats. And the closer you were to the leadership team, the more voice you had, and the further away you didn't really. I not personally it was Capitol, I think it was book, absolutely brilliant book. I recommend it to everyone. So, you know, even the leader's intention to do that can then get misinterpreted by by folks down down the line or or sideways or up. And again, what you're describing is not unusual. I met, and I repeat this story when I'm doing my trainers training, I was in front of 95 of the biggest CIOs, CTOs in the globe. Name the company. And we're talking about you know, hundreds of millions, we're talking about billions, you know, all the way up to 180 billion turnover. And I asked them a question, I said, put up your hand or stand up, whatever you're more comfortable with. If you can tell me your CEO's top five goals, and five was the number, it's not a real number, and you can tell me exactly how they measure those goals. You know, so you might say margin 18%, you might say, you know, uh grow growth and customer base plus more, you know, 14%. Out of the 90%, 94%, 95%, and only five put up their hand. So they're spending hundreds of millions all the way up to that on AI, data analytics, automation programs, and whatever else. They're going that way, and all I could think of was your CEO's going that way. So this isn't unusual, but we've so much more to do, and I think that's the bit where when rubber hits road, it's quite difficult. People bring baggage with them, bring history with them. We all do, some shape, form, or other. So, how do you get that firm back in track working in a different way? Because there's something very satisfying about yep, there's the diversity course, now we're all diverse. Remember that recently in the last couple of years? And if you didn't go in the diversity course and answer 10 questions at the end, you were not an advocate for just made no sense. Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 26:13

But we still uh and I think you know, similarly with this particular conversation, I mean, it it if I was looking at from our listeners' perspective, I would say we need to move away from the narrow focus of multi-generational workplace, and we need to focus on leveraging the strengths of our people, opposed to looking at age or you know, looking past stereotypes. We need to get back to the basics, you know. Any of these great suggestions that we might have, they will only work if if the foundations are there. They will only work.

Kieran Gilmurray 26:50

So, how do we get the foundations in place? And how do we not just one-offs go tick? How do we get micro learning or something? Well, what is the latest learning that we need to put into place to ensure that people are constantly growing? How do we train curiosity? Because I seen a brilliant one on on Twitter the other day, the random time I look at that. And someone said, I used to spend eight hours a day motivating my team, and then they went, What I realized was I was spending eight hours a day motivating my team. I should have just hired the right people in the first place, and then worked out how do I not demotivate them. So, how do we make it real, Lynn?

SPEAKER_01 27:24

Well, I suppose micro learning, you have mentioned that is uh an upcoming or a current trend, I suppose, that we're seeing about um how we learn, how we digest information. Um the micro learning is an interesting one, I think, because what I've done certainly with organizations where we we there's there's a move away from you know these three days off site and you know these nothing wrong with them. And if anybody wants to phone me to go on a three-day offsite, please, here's my here's my contact details, Laura Lawless leads your way h or consultancy. But RICO learning has become really popular, you know, and the reason for it is our attention spans have reduced, you know. So anybody that's currently still listening to this podcast, hats off to you because you know there was a piece of research I read recently that suggested our attention span was as short as seven minutes. Not your entirety. I know, I know. I mean, our our listeners are still with us, don't worry. Um, but you know, it's it's more practical. Okay, so it's easy to consume, fits into your busy schedule, but just because something is easy to consume doesn't mean it means it sticks. Okay, so watching a three-minute video and feedback doesn't mean, oh, I'm better at giving feedback. Wonderful. It has to be tied to real work, it has to be in the workflow immediately. If there's no opportunity to apply it straight away, it's gone. So instead of asking, coming in and having people attend a 90-minute bite-sized micro learning, there has to be an expectation set for them to try that at the next meeting to shift from here's some content to here's what I expect you to do in your next to one-to-one ask this one question. What did I try? What worked? What will I do differently the next time? And having managers ask those questions following the attendance at those 90-minute trainings. You know, one exposure isn't enough. So we want repetition, but in different ways. So re-repetition doesn't mean watching that three-minute feedback video over and over again, it means revisiting the idea. I know you'd love that, but it means revisiting the idea in different contexts. So have your short video, try it in practice, discuss it in a team meeting, get feedback. It's cyclical, it's always, always part of that conversation. Learning sticks when it becomes part of how our team talks and work. So, for example, if we think of managers asking, what did you try from that? One thing that we'd always um we we know is successful is accountability partners. So have your 90-minute micro learning, pair people up and hold each other to account. So you're going to meet with yo, Kieran, every two weeks for the next six weeks, and we're going to get uh we want a progress update as to how you're getting on with the application of that learning. You know, share what worked and what didn't work. You know, the uncomfortable truth is say micro learning fails because it's designed for consumption and not for behavioral change.

Kieran Gilmurray 30:31

So when you're very both because learning should be painful, and I don't mean that that you're like it's horrible, but what's been proven psychologically is that if you do quick micro learning, you probably forget it. And you doubly forget it if you don't practice within X number of minutes, hours or days. But learning does have to be painful, otherwise it doesn't stick in particular heads. Is that too too broad a term and it doesn't suit everyone? Because that is the bit that I worry about, is we we micro snack, we micro learn. Because I love what you're suggesting there, because the end of any any of my courses, be the hours, days, or weeks, I give everybody uh uh what I call a personal accountability plan, which is I want them to immediately adopt or or action some of the learning they've got. I call it three AI reps a day for the next 30 days. You'll have to do either. Yeah, give me away all the secrets, and then in 60 days, and then in 90 days, and then you've got an accountability partner who you're going to meet in 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days, and during that learning journey, you're also going to meet me. And uh all those things are designed A to be supportive, but also you know, make a public commitment, make a commitment to act, act and do things that are you know tangible. So, you know, if I'm teaching global consultants, it's about deal making. You know, I'm not teaching about doing a translation from you know uh Hungarian into Polish when they're never going to use it. They might, but you know, it tends to be deal making and so on. So, you know, all of those things help, but the but the learning takes time, the the commitment to do it takes time. The the micro seven minute, three minute snacking doesn't make me great. And to be honest, at times as well, I I get slightly uh you know disappointed that we we do have to check in. I'm happy to check in when it comes to learning, but I'm a huge fan of personal accountability, in that I am I am not your your your you know your your significant other that you know is going to emotionally check in with you all the time. I want you to feel safe. But you need to own your own performance at the same time. And I'm not trying to be cruel or harsh, because when I'm managing high performing teams, they've got my phone number, personal number, they've got my personal email address, they've access to me seven days a week, should they need to, uh genuinely do that. But all that accountability, all that comes with responsibility, all that comes with owning their own performance and learning and doing. And I'm not going to put a heavy hand on the tiller, it's more a light hand where I hire highly motivated, highly competent people and then spend my time surrounding them with other high performance individuals to allow them to grow and excel. Nobody wants average.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

I think that comes back again to basic foundations. That expectation is not being set. That responsibility is being assumed, but is not being implied in any way. It's not being articulated. So what we are finding is that we've, I suppose, almost overcorrected where we've moved from that long, heavy, you know, sometimes painful training, you know, to these short, easy, highly consumable content, but we're not setting that expectation. You know, so learning doesn't need to be painful, but it does take effort. Real learning isn't just about understanding, it's about changing how you think or how you behave. And that does require an element of discomfort, a bit of challenge, you know, it does need reflection. But if we're not setting that expectation at the outset, the risk of it becoming that micro learning that we forget immediately is absolutely there. You know, length isn't the issue. We've all sat through those three hour sessions, the six hour sessions that felt like days or weeks. You know, it's not about the length, it's about is it meaningful? Is it applied? Is it engaging? What's the expectation in terms of longer, you know, longer term expectations? Short births will introduce ideas, and then maybe it's a combination of longer, deeper sessions to apply and challenge them.

Kieran Gilmurray 34:23

I suppose then that comes down to individual learning style as well, and that's where at global scale to individually cater for every 430,000 individuals in your business can be quite a difficult beast. Kind of like why why I like AI, because when I'm teaching people, I'll show them the visual and the audio versions and the material and allow them to consume it in their own particular way. So let's reverse because we better be careful here because we're we're really are leaning into everybody's patience, staying with us this length of time.

Hiring When AI Redesigns Entry Roles

Kieran Gilmurray 34:50

We started out the conversation there with, you know, do we hire graduates? And I want to end on that momentarily as well, because I genuinely do go into workplaces who are under financial uh stress. Um, what they're tending to do is hoping that their existing workforce, regardless of age, can learn AI to allow them to do more things. And that is having an indirect effect on the number of people that they're actually hiring at the front end. Because if I can get 20, 30, 40% more work done, then am I going to hire anyone of any age? But my main concern with someone who is, you know, highly capable and somewhat younger than the current workforce or someone coming in is I actually like putting new blood into the business, uh, new hungry blood, regardless of age, because they come with different capabilities and different competencies. But we are really seeing that because companies are under pressure and we do want people to take time to learn. But the second thing we're actually seeing is a very competitive, uh, hyper-connected global market where you don't actually have two and three and four years' time to suddenly develop graduates, never mind anyone else, because you've got quarterly shareholder returns to evidence and value. So I think between AI, this disruption of recruitment, the competitive market and everything else we see ourselves faced with, actually, companies are having to make really difficult decisions that feel very short term. So how uh and close this out, Laura, how do how who do we bring into the workforce? Do we bring people into the workforce at all? How do we train them? How do we how do they, sorry, about to make a mistake, how do they performance manage themselves? And how do we knit all this together to make sure that we have got a workforce that feels safe and is very capable of producing everything the organization needs to allow everyone to enjoy the fruits of it over the longer term, whatever the longer term means these days.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

That's a nice meaty topic to close that one out on. And I suppose I would differentiate here is moving, I suppose it's it's about how, and we've spoken we've spoken about this before, it's how work is being redesigned. So we know that AI is changing the shape of, you know, what particularly those entry-level roles, you know, and maybe we haven't fully caught up with what that means. You know, the traditional early careers they were built around admin, low-risk tasks, because that was how people learned by doing the basics. But AI is now doing a lot of that work. So the question is how do people enter the workforce at all? I think opposed to do we hire and who do we hire? So it's the pathways are being disrupted. You know, we used to build experience through drafting, research, coordination, shadowing, sit by nelly. You know, now we know that AI can draft, we know AI can summarize, we know AI can analyze. So people are skipping parts of the learning journey. So we're not getting that immediate or less of that immediate impact. And organizations are still expecting the same outcomes. So, in terms of who we bring in now, what we need to shift from is hiring for what people can do today, which is we're still, and I'm still working with organizations who we're very much focused on that competency, hiring for what people can do today. We need to hire for what people can learn and adapt, emotional intelligence. We're looking for curiosity, we're looking for learning agility. You know, these are two things that are coming up time and time and time and time again. Critical thinking, ability to work with AI, not compete with it, you know, communication. So this is where I suppose a lot of organizations are still behind because they're measuring output, activity, visibility. But if AI is doing a lot of that, then the performance piece needs to be on the quality of thinking, decision making. Um, how did you approach the work opposed to did you do the work? Does that make sense?

Kieran Gilmurray 38:40

It kind of does because uh obviously not how work is done is different. So I'm not using an abacus to count, nor am I using a crayon to write a marketing strategy. Uh but I want ever, ever improving

The 18 Month View And Key Takeaways

Kieran Gilmurray 38:54

output, I want ever improving quality of product at the end of that, whatever that is, physical product or service product, and therefore the skills that I need to apply to that, uh my personality, my curiosity, my lifelong ability to learn, my resiliency, my agility, my work ethic, my ability to, you know, mentally bring my best self to work every day, my openness and ability not just to develop myself, but to you know, develop those others around me in the most kindest way possible. You know, there's so many little ingredients here that make the modern cake work. I'm a fan of what you're saying there, with a slight extension on it. Let me explain that one. I talk about a triangle, business tech and people strategy. All those three things have to go together. Very often they're treated as isolated. And to your point, people are hiring for today. Well, I get the fact that you might need today, but I'm always looking 18 months ahead because not only do I want what I what I want today, but I want to career path people into where we're actually going to. That allows the business to succeed because it's going to take 18 months to get people hugely competent in what I want them to do. It also allows them a career path, a career trajectory so they feel and know that they're growing in an environment where they can scale. You know, everybody doesn't want to come and just sit where they're at because that's career suicide to a small degree, should they ever choose to go to the market. And then in six months, I extend it out another 18 months, 12 months, another 18 months. So it's a constantly evolving cycle. And what I see at the moment is organizations dealing with today's problems. They're not career passing, therefore poor communication, they're not building competent people, they're putting up with poor performance, they're avoiding having, you know, development conversations or whatever else because they feel awkward or or or or, you know, and therefore why we're in the melting pot we're in, why we're not in the treacle and not moving on, is because we're not having conversations like we had today, drawing a stop in the sand, because this what someone once said to me, look, I'd rather be damned for what I do rather than damned for what I don't do. And I've lived that throughout my life, which basically means, look, just putting up with where we're currently at isn't going to work anymore because the world has moved on six times. If we're talking about the internet and how much that changed, things took about 20 years. If we're looking at what AI is doing, now AI is an 80-year-old overnight success story, the term invented in 56, but in the last couple of years, things have just shifted beneath us and they're only going to get uh faster. I don't think people realize the impact this is going to have on work and careers, uh, recruitment, hiring, you know, you name it, it's it AI is lit, it isn't happening. It's happened. It's just happening more and more and more and more. So, unless we actually draw a line in the sand and take a concrete set of actions to reset where we're at for the world in front of us, then we're going to be having these conversations over the next couple of years, we'll be sending people on micro learning courses, uh, being very uh unintentionally, you know, age or generational bias, and the world won't have moved on. So, folks, look, we better end it there because today's the deliberately longer session, because we did say learning should be painful or or variation of it. But look, if we go away with anything, Laura, what what are the key messages we want people to take away from all of our musings today?

SPEAKER_01 42:12

I suppose the key one for me, given my background in learning development, is to build learning into work, not around it. So if you want that ever-improving output that Kieran mentioned, learning can't sit in courses, it has to sit in the work. Um, things that you can do now is adding one learning action to your weekly work. You know, ask your managers to ask what did you try differently this week? And shift from training events to continuous capability building. The second thing is the dreaded reverse mentoring. Okay, so flip that and look at your capability swaps and pair people with strengths, not age. And the third thing that I would look at is um bearing in mind the foundations that we need to put in place is designing those teams around that cognitive diversity and how people think. So thinking around your challenger, your translator, and your integrator. And I suppose they would be my three key takeaways. Um, and if you want those better outcomes in the next 18 months, you know, don't wait. Start building the capability for today in how it actually happens. Otherwise, we'll get left behind.

Kieran Gilmurray 43:25

100%. If we haven't been already, my personal one is again, if you don't have access to people like myself and Lauren, of course, you can get access to us. Details in the comments below, is use AI as an executive coach in some shape, form, or other. But you own your own uh outcomes. And when I say your own, your own outcomes, I don't necessarily mean you're on your own row, your own ship. You should be going and having those conversations with your manager. But leaders and managers and CEOs and everyone above who are managing teams today, it isn't what you say, it's it's how you react once you're attempting to have those crucial development, whatever else conversations, and it's how you receive information. In the eyes of the person who's given you that will determine whether you've created a learning development and growth culture or whether you are the cause of stagnation inside your own business, but not realize it. Folks, until we meet next time, thank you so much indeed for staying with us and listening in today.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

Thank you.